The cold air of this realm bit into his exposed skin as he walked, the heat beneath prickling in protest at the insolent assault. New Jersey, they called it, this appropriated land, as if men had gazed upon these American planes and somehow been reminded of a quaint isle at sea beyond Anglia's southern shores. It was a habit; an addiction; a vice of these Americas: to steal words with no concept of what they meant. New Jersey, New York, New England. Boston, Birmingham, Cambridge, Bristol. What did the Americans who uttered those names with such pride know of the legacy they had co-opted? Even this monstrosity of a city, this Gotham, stole from the green and pleasant lands of his home. What right had they to such names?

Blood's ire towards their choices was earned. He had been there when York, when England, truly were new. He had watched Britannia come into being; watched invasion after invasion sweep through those lands, each time leaving something new behind. Anglian history was wounds, scars, something inflicted upon her lands and upon her people. Their legacy was endurance, and survival, long before Kings and Queens turned their thoughts to empires and foreign shores. These Americas, this bastard child of darker colonial times? The only legacy they earned for themselves was as thieves.

He had been a different man back then, of course. A lesser man, but a better one; or perhaps not. The failings of that better man were what had condemned him: a deal born of avarice, of hubris, of lust, sealed in his weakest moments, and paid for over an eternity since. He had been a knight, once, but such nobility was gone from him now: not taken, but bargained away; betrayed by his own vices. Now he was something else, both less, and more. A relic. An echo. A harbinger.

A warning.

This land of thieves was all to keen on breeding more of the same, Blood had learned. Such was the ilk that he pursued today: a common breed, prolific and persistent, but starved of wisdom. Were that not the case, they would have known better than to stray into the shadows of the Gotham quarters that fell beneath his gaze. They would have known better than to plague the lives of people he knew, of neighbours whose lives he could not quite unshackle himself from the darkness within to care for, and yet whose existence was a comfort to him. They had upset the balance of his ecosystem, disrupted the fabric of the approximated normalcy that he had tailored for himself amid this hell on Earth. That slight, that trespass, would not be allowed to stand.

Blood watched as the last sheen of sunlight disappeared beyond horizon's view. The criminals of Gotham were conditioned to fear the bat that awaited them in the shadows. The fools knew not the deeper darknesses that awaited them in the night.

"Gone," he uttered. "Gone."

The words blistered like hellfire on his tongue and lips. Beneath his skin, his blood boiled.

"The form of man."

He staggered, stumbling forward through the concealed alley, catching himself against the concrete corner of a building. A smear of blood lingered as the skin of his fingers began to crack, but in moments the blood was flame, and then gone. The hand rose to his forehead, a reflex against the agonising pain that seared through his skull. Wisps of hair brushed away on his fingers, dissolving to ash as they departed from him. His voice was raw, hoarse, the transformation already underway; but the words continued, compelled from within, a sentence that once begun could not be ended.

"Unleash the demon -"

One last stumbling step was taken, the body hunching, doubled in pain. Sinews popped and cracked as shoulders shifted and disjointed. Skin sloughed away, boiled into a fluid that slicked downwards before evaporating into steam and sulphur, exposing the ochre flesh beneath. Spiked horns erupted from where hair had once been, nails shredding and extending their way into claws, teeth stretching and sharpening into fangs. The smell of brimstone and ozone filled the air, as enchantment transfigured the tailored clothes into ragged robes.